demned to labour with their hands. The intellectual, whether Babylonian priest or modern theoretical physicist, knows only one kind of labour, mental labour. Over the course of millennia, the superiority of the latter over "crude" manual labour becomes deeply ingrained and acquires the force of a prejudice. Language, words and thoughts become endowed with mystical powers. Culture becomes the monopoly of a privileged elite, which jealously guards its secrets, and uses and abuses its position in its own interests.
In ancient times, the intellectual aristocracy made no attempt to conceal its contempt for physical labour. The following extract from an Egyptian text known as The Satire on the Trades, written about 2000 B.C. is supposed to consist of a father's exhortation to his son, whom he is sending to the Writing School to train as a scribe:
"I have seen how the belaboured man is belaboured-thou shouldst set thy heart in pursuit of writing. And I have observed how one may be rescued from his duties [sic!]-behold, there is nothing which surpasses writing ...
"I have seen the metalworker at his work at the mouth of his furnace. His fingers were somewhat like crocodiles; he stank more than fish-roe ...
"The small building contractor carries mud ... He is dirtier than vines or pigs from treading under his mud. His clothes are stiff with clay ...
"The arrow-maker, he is very miserable as he goes out into the desert [To get flint points]. Greater is that which he gives to his donkey than its work thereafter [is worth] ...
"The laundry man launders on the [river] bank, a neighbour of the crocodile ...
"Behold, there is no profession free of a boss-except for the scribe: he is the boss ...
"Behold, there is no scribe who lacks food from the property of the House of the King-life, prosperity, health! ... His father and his mother praise god, he being set upon the way of the living. Behold these things-I [have set them] before thee and thy children's children. " (13)
The same attitude was prevalent among the Greeks:
"What are called the mechanical arts," says Xenophon, "carry a social stigma and are rightly dishonoured in our cities, for these arts damage the bodies of those who work in them or who act as overseers, by compelling them to a sedentary life and to an indoor life, and, in some cases, to spend the whole day by the fire. This physical degeneration results also in deterioration of the soul. Furthermore, the workers at these trades simply have not got the time to perform the offices of friendship or citizenship. Consequently they are looked upon as bad friends and bad patriots, and in some cities, especially the warlike ones, it is not legal for a citizen to ply a mechanical trade. " (14)
The radical divorce between mental and manual labour deepens the illusion that ideas, thoughts and words have an independent existence. This misconception lies at the heart of all religion and philosophical idealism.
It was not god who created man after his own image, but, on the contrary, men and women who created gods in their own image and likeness. Ludwig Feuerbach said that if birds had a religion, their God would have wings. "Religion is a dream, in which our own conceptions and emotions appear to us as separate existences, beings out of ourselves. The religious mind does not distinguish between subjective and objective-it has no doubts; it has the faculty, not of discerning other things than itself, but of seeing its own conceptions out of itself as distinct beings. "(15) This was already understood by men like Xenophanes of Colophon (565-c.470 BC), who wrote "Homer and Hesiod have ascribed to the gods every deed that is shameful and dishonourable among men: stealing and adultery and deceiving each other ... The Ethiopians make their gods black and snub-nosed, and the Thracians theirs grey-eyed and red-haired ... If animals could paint and make things, like men, horses and oxen too would fashion the gods in their own image. " (16)
The Creation myths which exist in almost all religions invariably take their images from real life, for example, the image of the potter who gives form to formless clay. In the opinion of Gordon Childe, the story of the Creation in the first book of Genesis reflects the fact that, in Mesopotamia the land was indeed separated from the waters "in the Beginning," but not by divine intervention:
"The land on which the great cities of Babylonia were to rise had literally to be created; the prehistoric forerunner of the biblical Erech was built on a sort of platform of reeds, laid criss-cross upon the alluvial mud. The Hebrew book of Genesis has familiarised us with much older traditions of the pristine condition of Sumer-a 'chaos'...
